M.Redgrave

I'd rather be sailing

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

"At sea" Albert Edelfelt 1883

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

@AnnieW1303

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

@sueroberts7

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

https://t.co/JXh6XoIiBw

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

#abc730

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

Wilson will not survive the next election. He probably won't even still be the shadow treasurer when it's called. He's two, maybe three, embarrassing fuckups away from both. He's a slimy incompetent amongst a party full of them. #abc730

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

@JamesTate121 @BjWittwer

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

Jesusfuckingchrist
https://t.co/uoFr9u3Ltj

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[rebecca of New Farm Heights 🌈 @GutterTwits]

@AngusTaylorMP

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

*** Update
Today’s mediation - the second - has again failed to bring vexatious legal action against me to a close. This is not a fight I’ll shy away from as there is far too much at stake.

As an Australian and as a journalist I have a responsibility to stand up for our right to criticise a govt engaged in what the UN, most major human rights organisations around the world including in Israel & most genocide scholars, have deemed is a genocide.

Strong criticism of a country being investigated by the ICJ for plausible genocide, whose leaders are wanted by the ICC, is not only warranted, it is necessary.

I have been cognisant of the complexity of geopolitical issues my entire life and cannot resile from the very thing that propels my enquiry - wanting to understand both what is happening and why, including the historical context.

No one should presume they are entitled to hijack our deliberations and conclusions made in good faith, to the best of our ability, and after taking into account the views of all parties to a conflict and stakeholders. 

I will not be told what to think, and whether you agree or not with conclusions I have reached on specific issues, I’m sure you wouldn’t stand for it either. 

Our government should stand on the right side of history and impose sanctions on Israel, as we did against South Africa. Israel should not be held to a different standard.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Director of Allied Threat Liaison at the Pentagon.

M job is to hold two facts in my hands at the same time, every day, forever, and never let them touch.

Fact one: we tell Israel everything.

Fact two: this week the Defense Intelligence Agency rated Israel a critical espionage threat, the same category we use for Russia, for trying to learn the things we are already telling them.

I keep both facts true. The entire position, in one sentence. I have a corner office for it.

Every morning I send Mossad's liaison a briefing so complete it could be a confession. Troop movements. Our negotiating floor on Iran. The thing the Undersecretary said in the room he thought was quiet. I attach it. I hit send. And then, by 11, I file a counterintelligence report warning that Israel is aggressively attempting to obtain the exact document I emailed their station chief with a read receipt at 9:04.

People ask how Israel could possibly be spying on us when we hand them the material voluntarily. I want to be honest with you. It is not a contradiction. It is the product. If they only knew what we gave them, the relationship would be a friendship, and friendships do not have a budget line. The spying is what makes it a relationship. The spying is what gets renewed.

I have a filing cabinet. In the top drawer is Jonathan Pollard, 1985, a Navy analyst who handed Israel a room full of our secrets. Below him is Israel's formal apology, 1987, beautiful, "never again," signed. I have read it forty times. Below that is the 1995 memo where the Pentagon called Israel a non-traditional adversary and then swore it never wrote that down. Below that is this week, where the DIA made Israel a critical threat and three days later we approved the next aid package, and I filed the approval one drawer down from the apology, and the drawers do not know about each other. I make sure the drawers do not know about each other. Also the job.

There was an agreement in 1951. The CIA and Mossad shook hands. We would not spy on them. They would not spy on us. I keep the original in a frame. It is the funniest object I own. I show it to new hires and I watch their faces and I know within four seconds whether they will last.

The ones who say "but this is insane" do not last. The ones who say "so who at the embassy do I email the briefing to" get the corner office.

Here is what I have learned in twenty years of holding two facts apart with my bare hands. Washington does not want the contradiction solved. A solved contradiction is a closed file. A closed file is a smaller agency. Nobody in this building has ever been promoted for ending something.

So I send Mossad the briefing. I file the warning on Israel. I rate the ally a critical threat. I approve the aid. I accept the apology I have already filed forty times, and I slide it into the drawer above the renewal, and I keep the two facts from ever touching, because the day they touch is the day I find out which one was real, and I have built an entire life, a pension, a parking spot, on never finding out.

Israel is our closest ally.

Israel is our highest threat.

Both checks cleared.

You were never paying for security. You were paying me to keep the drawers from knowing about each other.

And the cabinet is full now.

So we are buying a bigger cabinet.

[StarBoySAR 🇭🇰 🇨🇳 🥭 @StarboySAR]

Brilliant piece from Pearls and Irritations. Finally, someone in Australia is saying out loud what the rest of us have been watching for the past five years

Let's be clear about what AUKUS actually is: the greatest military protection racket in modern history. Washington looked at its own crippled submarine industrial base—17 boats short, yards choking, Congress screaming—and found the perfect mark. A wealthy, eager, insecure middle power with a bipartisan fetish for great-power relevance and a defense minister who treats strategic questions like a classified state secret

The deal? Australia pays half a trillion dollars. In return, it gets used Virginia-class hand-me-downs—Block IV boats with a decade of wear already on the hulls, probably smelling faintly of its previous crew

Even more intriguing, the article confirms for what this overpriced second-hand Australian "sovereign" nuclear submarine fleet is actually for:

Hunting Chinese Jin-class and Type 096 SSBNs. Not to protect Sydney Harbour. Not to secure Australia's trade routes. To find, track, and if ordered, destroy the Chinese nuclear submarines that threaten continental America!

That's the job. That's the whole job. Australia just committed A$368 billion to be the US Navy's underwater security guard!

The comedy of "sovereign capability" is almost too rich. Sovereign? The reactors are American. The combat system is American. The weapons are American. The fuel is American. The intelligence feed is American. The maintenance schedule is American. Permanently tethering Australia to U.S. software, maintenance, and logistics, effectively ending any "sovereign" capability. The only thing Australian is the taxpayer—and the Prime Minister standing in front of a camera calling this independence

Australia is not buying a submarine; it is buying a node in a U.S. sensor network. The acquisition deeply integrates Australia into the U.S. military command structure, making Australia a tool for U.S. strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific — while a massive amount of Australian wealth is transferred into the U.S. military-industrial complex

And the timing is exquisite. Washington just added another half-trillion to its own defense budget while Australia is told to hit 3.5% of GDP. America gets the money, the boats, the basing rights at HMAS Stirling, and a Pacific ASW auxiliary. Australia gets the bill, the dependency, and the warm fuzzy feeling of being taken seriously by the adults.

The U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) emphasizes "burden-sharing among allies" and "realist diplomacy." This submarine deal is the perfect execution of that strategy: the U.S. maintains its military overmatch against China by essentially "outsourcing" the financial cost of undersea surveillance to Australia 🤡

Paul Keating called this three years ago. He was mocked, of course. The press club gasped. The security establishment rolled its eyes. But he was right then, and this article proves he's right now. It is worse than he thought. It's not that AUKUS is of little military benefit to Australia. It's that AUKUS is of negative military benefit to Australia—actively diverting resources from actual defense needs toward a capability designed for someone else's homeland

https://t.co/f7lYAMf3JY

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

https://t.co/deh0lacSWu

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The President of the United States is asleep at his desk. Again.

Behind him stand seven grown adults in expensive suits, and not one of them is doing anything about it. One is mid-sentence. Another is gazing sideways with the haunted look of a man whose pension depends on never acknowledging what he can see in his peripheral vision.

The rest of the world is watching, and the rest of the world has noticed something. Americans are terrified of authority. That fear has settled over this administration like a fog, and it turns otherwise functional adults into warm furniture. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. The paralysis is total.

In any European parliament, in any boardroom from Oslo to Ljubljana, someone would have leaned over by now. Tapped a shoulder. Said, quietly but clearly, that perhaps this isn’t the moment. Somebody would have done something, because the alternative, pretending a sleeping man is running a meeting, would have been too absurd to sustain.

Not here. Here, seven men have collectively decided that the correct professional response to the President losing consciousness in the Oval Office is to carry on as though he were a particularly demanding houseplant.

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

Australia Day!
On the 9th June 1803, Matthew Flinders, Bungaree & Trim The Cat completed their circumnavigation of Australia

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

I can hardly wait until the nations of Oceania & coastal nations of Asia have to stifle their laughter in 2035 or so as the Australians clank past in the subs the US abandoned because they were clumsy, obsolete & too expensive to run & needed a nuclear waste solution. #abc730

[Deepcut News @deepcutnews]

One of Australia’s most senior bureaucrats is working alongside pro-Israel supporters to bring the selection of research grants into line with new controversial hate speech laws.

https://t.co/VCcWpj46qf

[M.Redgrave @GravRed]

#abc730